Professor Bainbridge Blows a Gasket

It's easy and even rational to be a conservative who's angry with President Bush, who has presided over setbacks that include high spending, expansion of the federal bureacracy and few gains for the culture of life. But it's disappointing to see the esteemed blogger Professor Bainbridge roll out the weak and dishonest arguments of the left as he criticizes the war in Iraq:

After all, if Iraq's alleged WMD programs were the casus belli, why aren't we at war with Iran and North Korea? Not to mention Pakistan, which remains the odds-on favorite to supply the Islamofascists with a working nuke. If Saddam's cruelty to his own people was the casus belli, why aren't we taking out Kim Jong Il or any number of other nasty dictators? Indeed, what happened to the W of 2000, who correctly proclaimed nation building a failed cause and an inappropriate use of American military might? And why are we apparently going to allow the Islamists to write a more significant role for Islamic law into the new Iraqi constitution? If throwing a scare into the Saudis was the policy, so as to get them to rethink their deals with the jihadists, which has always struck me as the best rationale for the war, have things really improved on that front? The trouble with Bush's justification for the war is that it uses American troops as fly paper. Send US troops over to Iraq, where they'll attract all the terrorists, who otherwise would have come here, and whom we'll then kill. This theory has proven fallacious.

This is just a few blocks down from Bush Lied, People Died, and the saddest thing is that all these objections are easily refuted and have been, many times over. We're not at war with Iran and North Korea because we're not omnipotent. North Korea has 8,000 artillery pieces and a nuke or two virtually within sight of Seoul.  We're conducting a balancing act in Pakistan, backing the questionable figure of Musharraf as preferable to the certain hatred of nuclear-armed Islamists. The alleged fallacy of the alleged flypaper strategy is at least arguable considering we haven't been blown up or even gunned down on U.S. soil for a few years. We don't topple dictators abusing people all over the world because of that lack-of-omnipotence thing, and because not all countries threaten the strategic order the way Saddam did.  It's elementary, professor.

The gentleman runs so quickly to the wayback machine that he leaves behind a less than trivial fact:

Indeed, what happened to the W of 2000, who correctly proclaimed nation building a failed cause and an inappropriate use of American military might?

Sept. 11 happened. Sheesh.

As far as the Islamic constitution is concerned, I know that Bainbridge would agree we have to wait and see. The question is whether Islam will be all-governing or something less.  The dickering continues.